Opening Bell: 09.11.08

Lehman Struggles To Shore Up Confidence (WSJ) According to people listening in on the line, Dick Fuld has been calling his CEO friends on Wall Street and telling them "I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole every day," which probably would garner a little more sympathy if it weren't for the fact that 65% of the reason that Lehman Brothers is in this mess is because Dick spent the last three quarters feeding his Whack-A-MoleTM addiction at Dave and Busters.Tough Fight For Chief At Lehman (NYT) Tishman Speyer chairman and co-chief executive likens the "frustrating" position the Gorilla is in to piloting "a 40-foot sailboat in the midst of a 150-mile-per-hour hurricane." We think it's more like being the endangered manatee that got sucked under the powerboat in the midst of a 150-mile per hour hurricane and suffered, among other things, deep propeller wounds and and a bruised ego, but whatever.Snack Vendor -- or Undercover Job Recruiter? (WSJ) Best job ever: It was a humid June morning on David Perry's fourth day of masquerading as a snack-food vendor inside an industrial park. He had one day left on the canteen truck he'd rented for $500. The executive recruiter, wearing a hairnet and an apron, finally got a customer to tell him what he needed to know: the identity of a technology guru a client had hired Mr. Perry to poach from a competitor. Mr. Perry's client didn't know this person's name. So for days, the recruiter had been asking every coffee, cigarette and sandwich buyer who the "genius" was behind the large, publicly traded company's top-selling piece of software. Finally, an unsuspecting patron spilled the beans, and Mr. Perry got his man. "It was real hard detective work, but it was fun," he says.Questioning Lehman's Credibility (CNBC) Adorable woodland creature Dick Bové says the markets have been played one too many times by Lehman Brothers management and that the bank has lost our trust. Also, according to Dick, most people think REI Global looks, walks and talks like an accounting sham.